


Bellmare: A Ghost Story in Ten Parts

by Decoder13



Category: Battle for London in the Air (Roleplay)
Genre: I'm so sorry Oscar, Modern AU, Murder Mystery, ghost story au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:14:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 7,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28054452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decoder13/pseuds/Decoder13
Summary: Rebecca Tyler-Curtis is a deadline-pressed mystery novelist spending a week in a very old house in a town full of secrets. What could possibly go wrong?
Relationships: Rebecca Tyler/Tristan Curtis
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	1. Attic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunaofthemiste](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunaofthemiste/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a certain inquisitive writer arrives in Bellmare.

Rebecca slid her suitcase up against the wall and surveyed where she’d be staying for the next week. It had all the charm she’d hoped for when she booked the bed and breakfast, with the touch of eeriness that automatically comes from existing inside an old attic. There was a large round window across from the door with the tasteful floral curtains tied back. She could glimpse the tops of trees and the roofs of other buildings sprawling out beyond the house. Through the window, sunlight streamed over the antique sofa, the canopied bed, the oakwood dresser and desk. The owners had done a good job of preserving the sense of history while still introducing a modern sense of interior design. 

The one thing that felt a little out of place was the cable television mounted on the wall across from the couch. But that was probably for the best. Once Tristan got in, it’d be important that they could offer alternate commentary on the Food Network Holiday Bakeoff or whatever they were calling it this year while eating generic takeout pizza. That’d been a just-before-Christmas tradition since that time they got snowed in at a Columbus hotel three years ago when Rebecca was presenting at a convention.

Becca’s phone buzzed in her jacket pocket, and she slid it out to take a look. Perfect timing! She had four new texts from Tristan:

_Soooooooooooooo_

_how’s town?_

_murdery enough?_

And the fourth text was just seven rows of knife emojis.

Rebecca chuckled to herself as she looked over the messages. It was true that she was in the small town of Bellmare, Pennsylvania, on account of murder. Of course not to _commit_ it, or even to go on one of the local ghost tours, though she’d seen a few different ones advertised in shop windows in town. Just to write about it. 

Bellmare was a town known for all of its old Victorian homes and abundance of weird events back in the 1800s and early 1900s. Up through the 1920s, it seemed, most of the black sheep and peculiar cousins in Pennsylvania passed through Bellmare at one point or another. It was right along an old railroad and was a historical seat of wealth from shipping and manufacturing, but it was the redheaded stepchild of the old money towns in the region. 19th century Bellmare could boast of generous portions of corporate corruption, theft of all sizes, blackmail, extortion, duels, disappearances, and even outright murder. Now there were just lots of eclectic antique shops, questionable small museums, quirkily named eateries, and macabre tourist spots.

 _I have my pick of ghost tours_ , she texted back. 

_And there’s a hanged man on the pub sign across the street._

She didn’t even have to wait thirty seconds before the blinking ellipses appeared at the bottom of the message chain. 

_that’s some good murder!_ Tristan texted back.

 _Some GREAT murder,_ Becca replied. Then, _Love you_.

 _Love you too_ , Tristan texted back, along with a few rows of heart emojis. Her husband believed in emoji repetition as a valuable tool for emphasis.

She set her phone down on the oak desk and headed for her suitcase, a small smile playing on her lips. This was going to be good. She’d get set up here and get the flavor of the town, and Tristan would be in for the weekend. That manuscript would be done in no time.

Suddenly, she heard a quiet _scriiiiiiiiitch_ from back by the desk. She turned to look at the source of the sound, but there was nothing there other than the room phone, a lamp, and her phone.

Wait… had she put her phone that perilously close to the edge?

She pushed it back a few inches, then turned back to handling the suitcase. This was not a good time for stress-induced moments of unreality, or for stress-inducing moments of unreality, either. She just needed one good week. One quiet week, with a finished draft at the end of it. 

“Please,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Please, this week, just… don’t.”

She heard her phone promptly crash to the floor.


	2. Ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which an arrival is observed from another perspective.

Oscar had been in the old mansion for a long time. He wasn’t sure  _ how  _ long. He wasn’t sure of much of anything. If someone hadn’t shouted his first name when he died, he probably wouldn’t have been sure of that, either. As it was, he didn’t know his surname.

Mostly, he was angry, and he wasn’t shy about it. He suspected that he was the mansion’s dirty little secret by now. People had moved in and out over the years, probably because of him as often as not, which was fine. Good, even.

A second thing that he was sure of, after his name, was that he had failed someone. He’d died failing someone. And now he wasn’t particularly pleased about anyone being here. Not in a world where that person had met a bad end because of him. He would like to be apart. He would like to be alone. He would like to be gone entirely, but until that was an option, they would either have to live with his anger or leave him be.

And now a third thing that he was sure of was that the couple who seemed to own the house now had sent someone else to stay up in the attic. Again. Why did they keep doing this? And always frustratingly good-looking young people, too, or so it seemed. Were they trying to matchmake him or something?

The thought of anyone wanting to see him be in love made him angry. Feeling watched made him angry. Laughter made him  _ irate _ . He couldn’t do very much about it, which only made him even angrier, still without any more that he could do about it. But what he could do, he did. 

_ “Please,” _ the young woman said. To him? He didn’t recognize her or her voice, and yet she sounded so achingly familiar now that she was speaking. “ _ Please, this week, just… don’t. _ ”

Something about hearing  _ that  _ voice, in  _ this  _ house… 

A feeling welled up in the white hot core of Oscar’s being. More anger? Maybe. It was hard to place.

_ Are you okay?  _ he asked, not quite sure why.

No answer.

He screamed, slammed a fist down onto the desk in frustration, and swept the pocket mirror to the floor.


	3. Break

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which presences have been made quite well known.

_ morning _

_ love you! _

_ how’s the ghost? _

Rebecca’s phone hummed against the oak of the desk. Glancing towards it, she saw the screen alight with three messages from Tristan, plus one that was more of an emoji visualization of the previous sentiments: several rows of hearts and suns with a few ghosts sprinkled in there for good measure, and also a random knife tucked away in row four.

It was nice to know the noise was from Tristan. A lot of noise over the past couple of days had been a little less familiar, a little less certain.

Becca grinned as she replied, returning the love and then smashing out her own cocktail of vaguely happy but nearly random emojis and hearts, because Tristan deserved a taste of his own medicine. Of course she made sure to hide a ghost and a knife as a duo somewhere in the middle.

_ He tried to flip my mac and cheese,  _ she texted next.

A single row of shocked emojis followed from Tristan. Then:

_ call an exorcist _

_ jk! _

_ unless he flips pizza _

_ THEN call an exorcist _

It was the morning of day three in Bellmare, and the ghost in the attic was poised to become Rebecca’s side project. Not that she necessarily believed in ghosts, or in the attic having one. Even her slightly cracked phone screen hadn’t been enough to convince her without a doubt. But what sort of person who grows up to be a murder mystery writer  _ wouldn’t _ be at least a  _ little  _ curious when objects started flying on their own in her attic room at the historical Victorian mansion in a quirky small town?

She had a deadline coming up fast on a new manuscript for her series of historical murder mysteries. It wasn’t that she was having an especially tough time on this one; more that the last few had each gotten just a bit tougher. Her father had passed a few years ago, and Tristan’s mother the next year. Now Rebecca’s brother was tangled up in a whole ugly divorce and, as much as she loved him and as much as she felt this was  _ long  _ overdue, it had gone on to engulf most of the family in one way or another. Of course the books she managed to coax out still did well - she had something of a following at this point - and of course she and Tristan had more than a little going for them, not to mention each other. She knew that! But this novel wasn’t going as well as it should have been. With the way the past few years had been going, it was increasingly hard to write about a spunky detective who figured it all out when there was so much, it seemed, that Rebecca herself couldn’t.

Now here she was in Bellmare. Every kind of dramatic thing that could possibly have happened in the world prior to the computer age seemed to have happened here at least once. If she couldn’t write about some genuine antique intrigue here, there truly was no hope left for her.

She had her story mostly plotted (a mystery played out mostly in parlors and cafes and alleys and factories, based on a scandal that shook the town back in the 1870s), the draft already well on its way, and her itinerary for the week set. Two few-hour writing sessions every day, and some trips to local historical homes and parks and museums. That should have done the trick.

But now there was a maybe-ghost in the bed and breakfast, and whether or not it was anything more than an unruly draft in the very top of an old house, it  _ had  _ gotten Rebecca tempted to spend some research time on the history of the house itself. All she’d known going in was that it once belonged to someone who would have been on the periphery of the plot she was writing. How much closer could she get to the heart of the story now?

She wondered if maybe that was her ghost.  _ If  _ there  _ was  _ a ghost, of course.

Rebecca found herself struggling to get her mind back on the manuscript after bantering about the ghost with Tristan. She decided this was alright for now. She’d gotten most of what she could do for this session anyway.

“Do you need a break, too?” she asked maybe-the-ghost.

Something inside the attic floor slammed up against the boards in approval, or rage, or maybe just casually good-natured greeting. Well, probably not that last one.

It was getting harder to stay practical when whatever phenomenon was at work here was getting so… responsive.

She slid her phone into her pocket, left the room, and carefully locked the door behind her. It seemed that she’d forgotten to most times she’d left the room thus far. Yes, the ghost was a possible alternate explanation, but that wasn’t something she liked to give too much credence to unless she couldn’t help it. Not yet, anyway.

Whatever the case, it was high time to poke a little deeper into the house’s history.


	4. Clues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a certain presence tries another approach.

Oscar unlocked the door immediately after Rebecca left. He’d taken to doing that, and he’d kept doing it even after it became clear that it wouldn’t get a rise out of her. He was feeling quite a lot of things now that she was here, and it felt most natural to him to interpret them all white hot rage. But, as far as ghost powers went, he had all the fury of a bear awoken early from its slumber, but all the destructive potential of a single miffed kitten. 

Which was to say little raw strength or power, but a more than adequate capacity to cause creative minor damages.

He flipped over food. He ripped back the curtains loudly when the moon looked especially bright to him. He kept doing the lock thing. And he pounded on the floor a lot. Again and again, he kept pointing to the floor - with thrown sandwiches, with dropped phones, with beams of light, with pounding, with rotating the rugs around on the hardwood floors. Rebecca surely noticed it. One day he even caught her fingering some loose floorboards. But even he wasn’t sure why he felt like all his rage ought to suddenly be trained  _ there _ .

Oscar glided over to the window and looked out over the rooftops of the town. There was an unsettling mix of familiar landmarks and alien structures sprawled out before him. The lack of clear memory meant that it was hard to pinpoint which was which, but he felt the dissonance in his gut.

The unlocked doors were important. Beyond just being a nuisance, they were  _ important _ . So was the floor. Something was supposed to be there, something Rebecca ought to see. It was a thing that he knew in the same way that he knew that some buildings he could see now were much younger than him. He didn’t remember it, but it thrummed in the places where his bones used to be, and throbbed in the hole where his heart had stopped beating… how long ago?

Almost in spite of himself, he faded back over to the small table beside the attic bed. Rebecca had left her stack of leaflets and booklets about the town there as some bedtime reading. It made him sad to think about her reading, because it kept making him think of  _ someone else  _ reading. He just remembered the reading - not the person. There was a dark void in the memories, sitting in the downstairs window seat, reading everything ravenously and with a wicked sense of humor that sometimes they’d shared with him.

With a quick and concentrated effort, Oscar lifted a small postcard from the stack. It was a picture of a room that was not in this house but felt familiar. He ripped the image into four pieces and let three drift to the floor. He had to point to the floor again. Then he set the last one back down on the nightstand. 

Nothing conscious in Oscar knew what it meant. But maybe _she_ would.


	5. Skeleton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a visitor shares some thoughts on the historical character of Bellmare.

“Well, there  _ was  _ a skeleton underneath the floorboards in the attic,” Celine said, grinning over her cup of tea. “But my sister didn’t want it put back after the renovation three years ago. Not sure why not. I thought it lent a certain charm to the place.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow and took another sip of her own tea. She’d come downstairs to take another look at a series of old portraits above the parlor mantle piece that had caught her attention on day one. Did they have anything to do with her writing? Beyond vague vibes, no. With the ghost? Beyond also vague vibes, also no. But vague vibes were enough to base a quick break on. Rebecca prided herself on her intuition - she had a good gut instinct for when things deserved a little more attention.

What she hadn’t been expecting was to be spontaneously invited to tea with one of the owners and her visiting sister Celine, or an immediate, shameless confirmation of her suspicions about the attic floor. Apparently said visiting sister was a big fan who couldn’t possibly gush enough about the  _ aesthetics  _ of a scene where Rebecca’s spunky Edwardian heiress discerned a possible murder weapon based on the pattern of bloodstains on a ballgown. And she was only too happy to share potential fodder for her next thrilling mystery.

Mrs. Cordelia O’Rourke shook her head and laughed, almost apologetically. “You know that just leaving him there would have been disrespectful and exploitative.”

“He should have thought about that before he got himself murdered, hacked to pieces, and hidden under the attic floorboards of a darkly charming old mansion,” Celine retorted. “And it’s not like anyone had any idea who he might have been.” She glanced over to Rebecca. “The second half of the 19th century out here was  _ wild _ .”

“Define ‘wild’,” Rebecca said. She smiled and tried to keep the tone at… whatever odd place it was now, but this might be exactly the sort of thing she was looking for. “You mean the big scandals with the railroad and the factories it brought to town back in the 1870s?”

“Ha! Like those were the only scandals,” Celine laughed. “People dropped like flies from the end of the Civil War up through the turn of the century when all the really interesting people either aged into mellowness or were already dead. We were where all the crazy Wild West people who didn’t have the gumption to actually make it out west settled down to wreak havoc. Do you  _ really  _ have any idea how many ‘mysterious disappearances’ were going on out here back then? A lot of the factory workers, but some of the upper crust, too. Go check out the town archives.” She paused. “You know, you  _ could  _ set a whole new series here. You could start with a mystery about a skeleton that  _ someone smart enough to know what gives a house its charm  _ cannily left in the attic to be found by a visiting detective.”

“That sounds… like the start of something  _ really  _ intense,” Rebecca managed to say politely. She took another sip of tea to mask her discomfort.

Celine beamed. Her sister just rolled her eyes.

“If nothing else, it’s the respect we owe to the dead to give them a proper burial rather than keep them in the attic for flavor,” Cordelia replied, “and to not try to exploit their tragedy for advertising, or tourism, or art. Whoever he was, he  _ was  _ a person. You do realize that, yes?”

“He’s dead!” Celine protested. “Why should he care about anything anymore?” She looked over to Rebecca. “I’m sure  _ you’d  _ prefer it if the skeleton was still in your room, wouldn’t you?”

Rebecca took another sip of tea and quickly debated with herself over whether there was any correct way to answer that question. “I think the room has quite enough atmosphere even without a literal skeleton beneath the floorboards,” she replied, carefully treading a middle line.

Cordelia joined her sister in looking over at Rebecca, one eyebrow raised. “What sort of atmosphere do you mean?” she asked. It was hard to tell precisely what she was feeling, but at the very least, the comment seemed to have piqued her interest.

Before Rebecca was too pressed to explain, though, a phone that wasn’t hers buzzed in someone’s pocket. Both of the sisters looked down to check, and it appeared to be Cordelia whose phone was the true culprit. She scanned the text that had popped up on her screen and looked over to her sister with a sigh. “Does your husband absolutely  _ have  _ to keep getting into altercations with the mortuary museum guy?” she asked Celine.

“It’s only happened twice!” Celine exclaimed.

“Yes, in three days, which is weirdly frequent,” her sister countered. “Andrew’s calling me in to diffuse the tension between your husband the neurosurgeon and the mortuary museum guy, because at this point he’s a half inch shy of just punching someone.” 

And from there it was more banter, and a few hurried apologies from Cordelia for having to run out on a guest but this couldn’t wait, and maybe if Rebecca wanted to, the archives  _ could  _ be a place of interest for her. Normally you had to book time there, but mentioning Cordelia to Bell who worked at the desk could get her in on no notice.

Rebecca agreed to that last bit happily and assured both women that really, it was no problem at all. Then they were gone, and it was just her and many, many stern Victorian portraits.


	6. Papers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Bellmare Archives are of some small interest.

“So you’re staying at the old Jamison place?” the freckled young man working at the town archives asked. He must have just walked in to replace the older woman who’d been at the desk earlier but went on break. He hadn’t been there when Rebecca arrived. “I notice that’s the address you gave for delivering some of those document copies you wanted.”

Rebecca took a moment to realize that she was the only other person currently in the building, and therefore the only person he might be talking to. But once she did realize, she looked up from her sprawled out copies of old city plans from the 1870s and glanced over at him.

“Oh, yeah,” Rebecca replied. “Just for a few more days. As long as I’m delving into the history of the town, I thought I might as well stay in the middle of some of it.”

The archivist nodded. “It’s a good place for that!” He paused for a moment. “Hang on a moment. I think there’s something back here you might be interested in.”

Before Rebecca could even respond, he was gone. She went back to looking over the town plans after waiting about half a minute. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to keep starting back at the desk for any longer.

The archivist suddenly spoke from over her shoulder about 20 minutes later. “It’s what we have in the newspaper archives about the Jamison house,” he said, setting a small repurposed delivery box down on the table. “Sorry it took me a moment to print out copies. We had them digitized, though, so it wasn’t a lot of work. Seemed like you might be interested in them.”

“Wow,” Rebecca said, looking over the respectable pile of copied newspaper clippings in the box. It was only half-surprising that  _ of course _ the place she was staying at was locally notorious in the town that had once been regionally notorious. “This is… a lot. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” the archivist replied, his voice sounding a little fainter despite Rebecca not hearing him walk away.

When she looked up from the box of newspaper copies, he was gone.


	7. Eliza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rebecca discovers a kindred spirit.

That evening, Rebecca made the executive decision to cancel her writing time to read the newspaper clippings given to her by the archivist who was almost definitely a ghost. Was he her ghost? Probably not - too polite. But, while she prided herself on the logic and healthy dose of skepticism that had often been praised in her mystery stories, she also prided herself on her sense of intuition. And her intuition said that something wasn’t  _ right  _ about the younger archivist whom the older archivist later went on to deny knowing anything about when Rebecca mentioned him. So she’d tentatively accept ghosts as being on the table, for now.

_ A ghost gave me some newspapers _ , she texted Tristan.

_ that’s an improvement!  _ He replied almost immediately. 

They’d talked on the phone for at least a little while every day, but somehow it was the quick texts that felt most like a lifeline to Rebecca in the midst of all this. It was nice being able to just chat for a few whenever one of them needed it.

_ No, a different ghost,  _ Rebecca answered.

_ He lives in the archives. _

_ His freckles are adorable.  _

Tristan sent a series of ghost emojis and polka dots that Rebecca guessed were supposed to represent ghost freckles.

_ set him up with the attic ghost,  _ Tristan suggested.

_ get him a date! _

_ let him flip THEIR pizza _

Rebecca laughed out loud, and an abrupt knock on the attic floor replied.

She rolled her eyes, almost used to this after the past three days. “Would you settle down if I got you a date with the archives ghost?” she asked no one.

No reply. Of course not.

Whether or not the archive ghost would be a good match for the attic one, at least he had good taste in newspapers.

As she’d already known, the Jamison house had been a center of social activity in the late 1800s. Gregory Jamison, who’d owned the house she was staying in, kept getting in the paper mostly for shenanigans while drunk, followed by big business deals and elaborate gifts to the town as if in apology. It was a constant cycle from about 1870 to Gregory’s death in 1891. Gregory (Samuel in the novel) was the peripheral character who’d gotten her interested in the house in the first place.

This would have been interesting enough even without some of the recurring characters that appeared throughout the papers’ Jamison saga; namely, one Eliza Chathery. There was a lot of her in this selection of papers. In fact, she was in every single edition here in some capacity. It was as if the archives ghost had curated the selections around her more than around Gregory.

“Eliza?” Rebecca said aloud on a whim.

She could have _sworn_ that the wind blowing past the attic window metamorphosed into a man’s quiet sobs for a moment.

Hmmm.

Even if she weren’t ghost-endorsed, Eliza was interesting in that she featured in some articles and wrote others. Mostly little local interest pieces, but still. She had a tongue-in-cheek humor to her writing that made it particularly enjoyable. It had taken a few morning editions for Rebecca to realize that Eliza was Gregory’s niece: one of the infamous Jamisons through her mother, commenting on them and on the town from both without and within.

In 1884, Eliza published a piece about poor management and horrible conditions at a Jamison textile mill. Eliza had been a small child during the unrest in the 70s, but it seems it only took one quiet decade for working conditions in Bellmare to plummet back down and corruption to shoot back up. The piece itself was published anonymously, but a letter to the editor in the very next issue took great issue with the piece and outed Eliza as the author. Near the end of 1884, there was a passing mention of Eliza having a bodyguard, implied to have been recently hired by her father and barely tolerated by her. 

Rebecca began to say relevant-seeming names from the paper aloud whenever she got to them. Nothing made the wind cry the way Eliza’s name had. Rebecca tried saying her name again a couple of times. Eventually, she got a series of loud knocks from the floor, then an unfamiliar but probably-not-a ghost voice from downstairs shouting up at the “young ‘uns” to “shush their hanky panky and get some sleep”.

In 1885, tensions over local factories and the corruption surrounding an expansion of the railroad exploded. Eliza reported on some complaints and protests from citizens, once including comments from an Irish immigrant named Oscar Sherry. Rebecca wouldn’t have made much of a note of him, except that the very next issue included another anonymous letter to the editor about Eliza, implying that Oscar wasn’t a valid resource and that Eliza counted too much on him. This suggested that he wasn’t just the one-time source he seemed to be. 

Rebecca said Oscar’s name out loud. All the lights in the room went out.

“Are you… up here, Oscar?” she said, tentatively. Her bed stand rattled. Beside her, someone whispered,  _ Eliza, go home _ .

Rebecca closed her eyes tight as the hairs on her arms and neck stood up on end. She felt someone else’s breath drift past the side of her face. The floorboards creaked, like someone was walking around.

She fumbled with her phone beside her for a moment, until she saw the faint orange-white glow past her eyelids that told her she’d succeeded in turning the flashlight on.

When Rebecca opened her eyes and shone the flashlight around the room, no one was there. She shrugged on her robe and her slippers and headed down to the parlor to keep reading there. She didn’t even bother to lock the door. It wouldn’t mean anything anyway.

As she left, someone began to slam against the side table over and over again. She didn’t turn back to look. 


	8. Oscar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which he remembers.

Oscar watched her leave in the dark, the inexplicable light of her pocket mirror proving enough for her to move around by.

Those names.  _ All those names _ . So many names, after so long, drifting over him like a fog, some of them passing him by from there and others clinging to him in thin wisps.

_ Eliza Chathery _ .

He knew that name. He knew that name, like he knew his own, even if he hadn’t known that he knew it for years. 

_ Oscar Sherry _ .

That one  _ was _ his own.

But she wouldn’t look at the bedside table. She was too absorbed in all of those papers from… wherever they’d come from, Oscar didn’t know. He was pounding his fists across it, for heaven’s sake! He was standing right there!

She looked something like Eliza. That was it. And Eliza... Eliza was why he knew his name, Oscar decided. The woman calling out to him at the very end. 

The scene drifted through whatever he had left of a mind: a chilly night in a garden. Eliza. Someone else, a young man with freckles and a dark coat, whom Eliza didn’t recognize but Oscar did. The scene expanded outwards in his mind. What the years had compressed into a single instant was unfolded back out to its true duration. The shout of his name… it wasn’t just as he died, he realized, and it wasn’t a shout. It was loud because it was close. Right in his ear.

_ Let’s go, Oscar _ .

_ You go. Keep off to the side. Follow the hedge maze a little. I’ll meet you back in the house. _

_ I’m not an idiot. You’re about to do something stupid. _

_ Not something stupid. My job. _

_ Oscar, you… _

_ I’m just paranoid! You know that.  _

Eliza’s hushed, breaking laughter.

_Go home, Eliza_.

_ I’ll see you in the house _ , she said.

But she didn’t. 

Oscar stalled until she was out of sight. He and the man argued, and he claimed he was alone tonight, just arriving to visit her. The man with freckles charged towards where she’d walked away. Oscar stopped him. He won the fight, but the knife had probably been poisoned. He took a scratch, only a scratch, he thought, but then he was dying. 

He was alive for a little while, kept somewhere small and dark, and locked. He was sure Eliza couldn’t have made it to the house before he was gone. He’d been taken somewhere but he couldn’t get the lock undone. Maybe they just wanted him to fade away here without making too much blood to clean up. The knife had definitely been poisoned. Why did they have to make it quiet, why did they have to make it hurt like this? 

At least it wasn’t Eliza here. Would they have done this to Eliza? Was this some plan for Eliza? He wished he’d checked over his shoulder before he leapt into action, he wished he’d taken the other man down with him for sure, he wished he could just work that lock free and tumble out and silence that  _ horrible laughter beyond the door  _ with a few shots to some smug round faces and get back to Eliza and know if she...

_ Go home _ ,  _ Eliza _ .

And she  _ had  _ left. Both of her. Some good it had done or would do. Oscar had no energy left to kick, or punch, or tear, or break. He’d been failing for a hundred years, and he was very angry, but he was also very sorry, and very, very tired.


	9. Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which names are put to faces.

Rebecca was relieved to find no one else in the parlor this late at night, not even Andrew or Cordelia with homemade bread or tea or something. She clicked on the little reading lamp next to the velvety old couch.

Maybe she should have been looking for people. Maybe she should have sought out a group to shake the ghost off. But no. No, something about him - about Oscar - left her wanting to be alone instead.

Of course she’d brought the box of papers with her. She curled up on the couch and kept reading.

In early 1886, Oscar was mentioned a third time, this time as a missing person. A brief call for any information on his whereabouts was published, though those appeared disconcertingly often for various people throughout the 1870s and 1880s. His last known whereabouts were the garden of a local mansion, though, which was odd for a factory worker. The writer apparently hadn't seen any need for explanation. Were Oscar and his connection to a certain family a little infamous? There was no obituary for Oscar in the papers Rebecca had. Eliza’s columns became less frequent and more bitter from then up until mid-1887, when they stopped entirely. Her marriage to a man from another town further east was announced in the latest paper in the box, one from November of 1888.

With that, Rebecca was at the bottom of the box. Only one more paper was left, and this one wasn’t a copy of a newspaper. No - this one was just a handwritten note. Only five words written in a shaky cursive hand.

_ I am so sorry, Oscar. _

Rebecca slid her phone out and texted Tristan:  _ The archive ghost killed the guy in the attic. _

Tristan’s reply, despite the late hour, was almost immediate.

_ do you want to call now? _

_ I have strong shoulders and puns _

Rebecca nodded to herself a little before she actually typed out a reply.

_ Yeah. _

_ Yeah, that would be good. _

She paused. 

_ But I need to do something first. _

In the Jamison parlor portraits, a vaguely smirking woman with some small resemblance to Rebecca was scattered across the images. Rebecca could trace the progress of this woman’s life from youth through young adulthood from one end of the parlor to the other. In one case, she was the sole subject of the picture. Usually she was with someone or in a large group.

There were three images in which the woman appeared to be from her late teens to her mid-20s that were of particular interest. In the first, she was in a group of 10 young people and looking a little disgruntled, with a dark-haired man slightly older than her standing somberly beside her. In the next, the group was smaller, and the same dark-haired man appeared among what Becca assumed to be the woman’s family and/or friends. Despite the enforced dour Victorian portrait faces, happiness peaked through. The third was the woman alone. Something was gone from her eyes. The dark-haired man never appeared again. The woman only appeared in two more groups after that.

Rebecca had a guess about who both the woman and the man were now.

She looked back over to the one group picture where the two were together and looked their happiest. Past the early resentment and bickering that was surely there, before they knew how it was all going to end. Becca’s eyes focused on the man, standing over Eliza’s shoulder and gazing out with kind eyes.

Rebecca smiled a little sadly and whispered, “Hello, Oscar.”


	10. Okay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a question is answered.

Rebecca returned to the attic room with her box of evidence under one arm and the note from the archives ghost in one hand.

Over the past few hours, she’d pieced the story together. Oscar Sherry was a local worker who’d been hired as Eliza’s bodyguard by her father after her stories in the paper started getting her threats. They’d warmed up to each other over time. Eliza had only become more inspired to speak out due to her growing friendship with Oscar, though, so the articles that got her threats never stopped. It probably became an open secret that she and Oscar had developed a relationship of some sort beyond what was strictly professional, though there wasn’t enough evidence anywhere for Rebecca to define it beyond that.

One night, Oscar must have been visiting Eliza, or even with her, when someone showed up at the house after her. Oscar probably “disappeared” because he was driven out of town, or else killed doing his job. Someone on the inside of things was probably trying to paint it as Oscar being driven from town, or even leaving for fear of his life. Eliza didn’t buy it, never had proof, but never shut up about her suspicions, either. As soon as she could, she left the town for good.

Who was the murderer? Rebecca would put money on the archive ghost. If she had to pin a name to the archive ghost, she’d put a little extra money on one Dave Heaton, a secretary to Gregory Jamison, whose freckles one of the contributing writers liked to linger on in descriptions of him accompanying Jamison to various places. Those town plans from the 1870s suggested that the historical building which was now the archives used to contain Mr. Jamison’s and Mr. Heaton’s offices.

And that connection, plus the likely final resting place of Oscar’s body, suggested an ultimate culprit: Gregory Jamison, irate that his own niece had been undermining his assorted schemes and associating with “an Irish factory boy,” as one article had so artlessly put it. He wanted her silenced without alienating his sister and his brother-in-law, who seemed to at least accept her writing career. So he tried to get someone else to dispose of her if he couldn’t persuade her to keep quiet via his anonymous letters. And he was none too upset about Dave only managing to kill Oscar Sherry instead. No one was about to search for the young Irishman under the floorboards of Mr. Jamison’s attic.

Rebecca flipped on all the lights and set the box down on the desk next to her laptop.

“I’m back,” she said. She then set the note down next to the box. “This is from someone you know, I think? Read it when you want to.” She wasn’t keen on being  _ too  _ sympathetic to Dave, if that was his name, but he’d taken a lot of trouble to linger in the world for this long just to get someone who understood to bring a note to Oscar. The least she could do was deliver it.

There was a single, tired  _ slap  _ against the surface of the bed side table. Oscar didn’t have a lot of punching left in him, Rebecca supposed, which made sense. He’d been loud these past few days, slamming against everything. Maybe even worried about her? Though now his quiet flipped things. It was troubling to hear him so much… less.

She finally looked over to the table.

There, where she’d been keeping local maps and pamphlets she’d acquired while she was here, there was a single torn scrap of paper with ragged edges resting atop the pile. She glanced down to the floor and saw one other scrap poking out from under the table and another lurking in the shadow beneath her bed. 

The scrap carefully set on the table was just one word from the end of whatever heading sentence it had originally belonged to. Rebecca sat down on the bed to read it.

It read, simply: “okay?”

Rebecca looked up from the scrap and bit her bottom lip. She’d done a pretty good job of not crying tonight, but she  _ could _ feel some tears pooling up at the bottom of her eyes now. 

She could see him, almost. In the way the shadows and light fell within the room, she could almost make out the brown hair and strong jaw from the portrait, the broad shoulders a little slouched with exhaustion, a simple blue coat and hands tucked into pockets.  _ If _ she really saw him, then he was looking at her.

“Yeah, Oscar,” Rebecca said quietly. “Yeah, Eliza was okay. I know what happened, I think, and you did well. Eliza was okay.”

_ Good _ , a voice said. It was quiet, and the whole thing was caught up in a long, deep sigh. But he lingered.

“I’m okay, too,” she added, a little unsure as to why.

The faint impression of Oscar Sherry nodded and flickered for a moment like the flame of a candle. Then he faded off into the suggestion of mist and was gone.


	11. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a story is finished.

Rebecca called Tristan about half an hour later. He was still awake. After a long, long talk about what had gone down, he was surprisingly open-minded about the whole thing. The two of them had suffered some losses much closer to home over the past couple years, after all. Some of what Tristan said told Rebecca that he was almost comforted by it. She had to agree now that she’d had at least a few minutes of distance from everything. 

Ghost or no ghost, somehow, the truth had worked itself out. The person the ghost loved never forgot him but found happiness again in time. All in good time. It didn’t all have to be solved in a moment, or a day, or a year. 

Over a hundred years later and Dave was still trying to say sorry, and finally got something through. The note she’d left on the desk was no longer there after Oscar disappeared. Rebecca wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but with the height of the tension behind her now, she felt alright about assuming that it had been a good thing.

Over a hundred years later and Oscar still needed to know that Eliza was okay, that he hadn’t failed her, and he’d finally gotten the word he needed. The room felt a lot less angry now without Oscar here. Somehow, Rebecca knew that was the case: that Oscar hadn’t just called it a night before gearing the haunting right back up tomorrow. But the emptiness was also a little disconcerting. Rebecca hadn’t really been aware of how much of the feeling of the room came from what haunted it until that was laid to rest. Though of course that was for the best. Over just a few days, she’d grown to feel quite a lot about the ghost. Her ghost. Maybe, wherever Oscar was now, he’d get to see Eliza and learn the truth of what Rebecca said directly from her.

Still, Rebecca was quietly relieved when Tristan took a little time off from work to join her in Bellmare a bit early. It was nice to have someone here who’d shared the sense of the experience, at least, especially if it was Tristan. He showed up with a very large tub of ice cream and filled the room back up with presence instantly. Warm, alive, loving _presence_.

Rebecca never shook the feeling that the O’Rourkes had felt some sense of the ghost in the house. She never really got a chance to confirm it with either of them, though. The closest she got was a chat with Cordelia about how quiet things had been for the past few days. They had it the day before Rebecca and Tristan left, after Rebecca had talked with the B&B owners about what she’d managed to gather from some of her research in the archives. Cordelia hadn’t said anything very specific, or that would have sounded odd on its own. But she did mention that it was “a lot more peaceful the past few days than it has been in a while” in the middle of the conversation about how now Rebecca knew who the attic skeleton was. Mr. Andrew O’Rourke had put one hand over his wife’s and smiled in a way that was probably supposed to be subtle but wasn’t. No more had to be said. Rebecca would always believe that they knew.

The manuscript Rebecca was working on did get done by the deadline, though the last chapter was written after she and Tristan got back home. Their remaining time in Bellmare had been focused on… well, on  _ them _ , and it was nice. They took a couple more trips to the archives, of course, and even a ghost tour one night, but mostly they let it sit for a bit. 

In the following month, Rebecca began a correspondence with the O’Rourkes, the Bellmare City Archives, and the local cemetery where the unidentified bones from the Jamison attic had been buried. More records were accessed and analyzed, suspicions were confirmed, and while not much could be done  _ now _ , at least Oscar got a proper headstone with his name on it and a belated obituary written by Rebecca. 

A bit of press did get stirred up by the whole thing -  _ Detective Novelist Solves 140-year-old Murder Mystery!  _ \- thanks at least in part to Celine, surely. It was good for the publicity of Rebecca’s current book whether she meant it to be or not. She was asked to write about the events she’d uncovered in Bellmare as a sequel, but she declined. She had plenty of other murder mysteries in her, and surely bits of this one would leak into her writing in future whether she wanted them to or not. It wasn’t something she wanted to try to boil down into a tidy little plot and earn her living off of, though. That would have felt a very special sort of wrong.

She did start keeping more of an eye out for  _ real  _ mysteries, though. There weren’t a lot more ghosts in her life after that, thank goodness. But now she knew what to look for and that, just maybe, she herself  _ did  _ have that gift for tying threads together that she tried so hard to write others as having. Even if piecing the shards back together took a little while. Like 140 years.

The one remaining mystery from the events in Bellmare, though, took about half a year to solve.

Five months out from her stay at the Jamison mansion, Rebecca was looking through some old family photo albums, keepsake boxes, and genealogical records that her brother had dropped off for her. He was moving out of his house and had stumbled across them. He thought she’d be interested, and of course she was.

There was a lot in there to smile at and to be intrigued by. A lot of stories for another day. But one letter, a yellowing 1930s birth certificate, and a newspaper clipping stored in a small wooden box gave closure about one thing she’d been wondering ever since Bellmare: Why Oscar had been so insistent on getting closure from  _ her  _ after so long simmering in that attic.

The letter, the birth certificate, and the clipping all mentioned the grandmother of Rebecca’s grandmother.

A woman named Eliza Chathery.


End file.
